On July 17, 2025, Zoho quietly did something loud: it shipped its own foundation model and a full stack of agent-building tools. Here’s a walk-through of what landed, why it’s different, and how you can start taking advantage—all in plain English.
Most SaaS vendors just wire up someone else’s model. Zoho built three of its own—1.3 B, 2.6 B, and 7 B parameters—trained on real Zoho product workflows using NVIDIA accelerated compute. Pick the size that matches your latency-versus-power trade-off. Your data never leaves Zoho’s data centers in the US, India, or the EU.
Why you care: Security teams stay happy, and finance doesn’t get a surprise GPU bill.
Zoho also rolled out two speech-to-text models (English and Hindi) that benchmark up to 75 % better than comparable open-source ASR—while running on commodity hardware. More languages are already on the roadmap.
Use case: Turn every customer call, meeting, or video into searchable text without paying a per-minute fee.
Zoho baked 25+ pre-built “digital employees” straight into its apps:
Chat-first BI tool: builds pipelines, dashboards, even ML prototypes.
Reads tickets in Zoho Desk, answers or routes them.
Spots upsell/cross-sell gaps and suggests campaigns.
Calculates win odds, next best actions.
Ranks applicants against role criteria.
Fire one up, connect it to your existing permission sets, and it behaves just like any other user—minus the PTO requests
If the off-the-shelf agents don’t scratch your itch, Agent Studio lets you build your own with nothing more than prompts (or optional low-code). You automatically inherit 700+ Zoho actions—everything from creating invoices to kicking off a marketing drip. Schedule them, trigger them, or surface them in chat. Admins get audit trails and performance dashboards out of the box.
All agents—Zoho’s, yours, or a partner’s—live in a new section of Zoho Marketplace. Click to install, set permissions, done. For developers and ISVs, it’s a chance to sell verticalized brains rather than entire apps.
Zoho adopted the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and even hosts its own MCP server. Translation: third-party tools can call Zoho actions without punching holes in your security model. Today’s library spans 15+ Zoho apps and is growing.
Zoho says more languages, more pre-built agents, and expanded marketplace categories are on deck. But the headline is clear: AI in Zoho isn’t a bolt-on—it’s now baked into the operating system of the entire suite. If you’re already in the Zoho ecosystem, start with Ask Zia 2.0 or the Customer Service Agent and see how far you can automate. If you’re not, this just became a much stronger reason to give the platform a hard look.
